


you picked me

by openended



Series: Olivia Shepard [13]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Accidental Proposals, F/M, Marriage Proposal, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-11
Updated: 2013-12-11
Packaged: 2018-01-04 07:32:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1078261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/openended/pseuds/openended
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's more than one reason to win a war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you picked me

She hasn’t brought up the future. Next week, sure, and definitely tomorrow, but as far as any sort of long-term future is concerned? Shepard hasn’t said a word. Garrus has followed her lead, trusting that she has reasons for not wanting to talk about what happens when this is all over, and so immediately trips over himself trying to turn his sentence that starts with “after the war” into something very much not a conversation about the future. He fails and falls into silence instead.

He hopes she’s too absorbed in her book to notice he’d said anything at all, but luck is not on his side tonight. She looks at him curiously, eyes half-squinted trying to read his mind and figure out the second half of the sentence. She carefully folds down the corner of her book and sets it aside, and he curses himself for distracting her from the one hour a night she isn’t focused on the war.

“What were you going to say?” She pushes her hair out of her eyes.

“Nothing, nevermind.” It’s the first time he’s lied to her. He doesn’t like the way it feels and he nearly takes it back and finishes his original thought, but her silence on the matter of anything that might come after defeating the Reapers has been so resolute that he doesn’t dare.

Shepard sighs and tugs her sweater sleeves over her hands. He wonders how it’s possible for one person to have such extremes; just hours ago she was focused and hard, driven to terrifying violence on Thessia. Now, she hasn’t bothered with pants and her hamster is asleep on her shoulder.

“You know, I didn’t want to be military.”

That draws him up short and breaks his concentration away from studying the way she’s worked thumb holes into her sleeves. For all she’s earned a bit of shouting about the position Hackett and Anderson have put her in, she doesn’t sound like she’s leading up to a good yell. “Really?”

She nods and catches Hipparchus as he begins to wake up. She lets him sleepily run over her hands a few times before she stands up and sets him back in his cage. “I only joined because they’d pay for college. Mom and I didn’t really have much after Mindoir; everything she made went directly into rent and food, so I knew it was the only way I’d be able to afford school.” She looks up at the viewport. “The galaxy’s so big and we haven’t even explored a third of it.” She settles back onto the couch. “I wanted to study stellar cartography, get a job with Baria. They have these teams, four or five people on a ship. They’re gone for years at a time, just charting stars and systems no one’s been to yet. Can you imagine? Being the first person to ever see a planet, or a comet, to fly through a nebula?”

Now he understands her fascination with the galaxy map, and why he sometimes finds her sitting on the platform underneath it late at night with the Reaper markers turned off. “Why didn’t you?”

She pulls out of her reverie. “I did. But the Alliance required a few more years out of me after I graduated, and then Elysium and N school happened. There was always one more mission. Hackett’s really hard to say no to.”

He sits next to her on the couch. “I’d say you’ve earned it after this one.” She draws her knees up to her chest and doesn’t respond. “Shepard, I know you’re trying to lead me to a point here, but I need some help.”

She stares at her hands and remains quiet. Garrus reaches out and brushes a talon against her scarred cheek; it hasn’t escaped him that they’ve become more noticeable recently. She turns her head into his touch and closes her eyes.

“It’s getting harder to fight just for other people.” Her voice is barely audible, but picks up strength as she lifts her eyes to meet his. “I can’t promise anything, and neither can you. But I need to believe that there’s something waiting for _us_ on the other side of this war. If I have that to fight for, if I know there’s a future for us at the end, I can keep going. So whatever you were going to say about after the war, say it.” Her eyes shimmer with unshed tears and she clenches her jaw, willing them to remain unshed.

He drops his hand to catch hers. What he’d planned to say was that after the war, they should throw the culturally appropriate obscene gesture at their respective governments and go find themselves a planet the Reapers hadn’t bothered and live out their days uninterrupted. But what he says, and doesn’t even think about first, is, “I don’t know much about how it works in human culture, but turians have a bonding ceremony with their mates. I was thinking that, after the war, we could have ours. You know, if that’s something you wanted.”

“Garrus Vakarian, did you just ask me to marry you?”

He nods. “Yes.”

Watching the smile slowly break across her face and finally reach her eyes makes his heart swell and he again thanks all the spirits for allowing him to be this lucky.

“Then I think,” she says, sliding effortlessly into his lap, “that we have a war to win. Yes.”


End file.
